This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull from)… but ultimately, it boils down to one fundamental fear.

That fear is, ultimately, that the legalization and institutionalization of gay marriage will be some kind of apocalyptic event.

The funny thing about fear is, it’s worse when it has no form. When I used to teach public speaking to college students, I’d ask my students to imagine the worst possible case scenario for them flubbing a speech. Like, worst possible case.

Usually, the scenarios they would come up with went something like this: they flub a speech, and it ends up on Youtube, and the whole world sees it and laughs at them, and they end up lonely and alone in their fifties, unmarried and childless and still remembered as that idiot who flubbed that speech. In their loneliness, they end up taking a long walk off a short skyscraper roof or something. (More creative scenarios had students ending up in North Korean gulag, or imprisoned in their family homes, or executed for shaming the nation.)

The point of the exercise was to give them a picture of what absolute,utter failure would look like. And the point of making it so extreme–extreme to the point of laughable ridiculousness–was so that they could bring it to mind everytime they made some minor flub in a speech: to remind themselves, “Wait, the stakes aren’t that high!” That is, to remind them that there was no Speech-Flub-Pocalypse waiting for them out there in the future. The real worst case scenario was that they’d freeze up, and cack a speech, and the audience would be patient and supportive while they recovered, and maybe they’d lose a few points on the grade for that speech, depending how well they recovered.

The principle, though is also what’s scariest is the unpredictable, the unknown. It’s a shadowy realm that people fill in with all kinds of monstrosities. The revulsion that so many opponents of gay marriage express seems so often to boil down to men having anal sex. As the lesbians of the world would probably agree (reality check, anyone?), opponents of gay marriage seem to tend to obsess about male-male sex, probably because of the pornography that informs what they imagine lesbians do; it’s surely unrealistic, but it’s a placeholder that assuages their fears.

What those fears are, I don’t know: I’ve never really been inside an anti-gay bigot’s head. But one cannot help but wonder whether it, too, is pornographic in nature: a sort of dystopian Village People horror show set in some dark, dank, shadowy underworld out of Dante’s inferno or something, in which they (the opponents of equal marriage rights) are compelled to participate in sweaty, rigorous anal sex themselves. I mean, I really think they imagine there’s going to be leather chaps and bondage gear in the streets, and everyone’s sex organs hanging out for the sun to kiss, the very day after gay people get the right to marry in their country. Lurid, over-the-top… why else the panic?

This horror-show in the heads of conservative opponents of gay marriage, we can call The Gay-Marriage-Pocalypse. It’s a fantasy that fills in the shadows of an open question, which is: what would happen in a world where gay marriage is legalized?

What would happen is simple, of course. The legalization of interracial marriage in a lot of places is a precedent we can use.

Homosexuals would get married. Yes, probably there would be a big rush of that, at first. But eventually, you’d see the rate die down to about the average for their combined class, race, age group ,and their region.

Then they would have a little more time to spend, either on hobbies, or on other civil rights work, or on raising kids, or whatever they choose–like everyone else–because they wouldn’t be forced to spend a portion of their time fighting for equal rights.

They would marry, like heterosexuals. Some would divorce, just like heterosexuals. They would get mini-vans, and buy houses in the suburbs, and in the long run, they would be no more notable than a mixed-race couple, or a couple with one fat partner and one thin partner, or, eventually, no more notable than any other couple… just like heterosexuals.

Some would adopt–just like heterosexuals. Others would happily live as married couples till one of them died of old age… just like heterosexuals. Some would lose their spouses in tragic accidents… just like heterosexuals. (Though, at least, given that they would be recognized as spouses, they could see their dying spouses in any hospital in the country, regardless of anyone else’s religious or political affiliations.)

They would buy cardigans and jeans and running shoes, just as anyone does. They would go on diets that fail, like anyone. They would hold jobs across a bewildering array of fields, not just fashion designer and hair stylist… just like they do now, and just like anyone.

In fact, the only thing that would really change would be that they have equal rights to heterosexuals.

There is no Gay-Marriage-Pocalypse. Neither Canada nor Argentina have experienced a sudden increase in kidnappings with victims strapped into leather chaps and raped from behind. Sweden and South Africa have not exploded in a national paroxysm of spontaneous Village People performances. This Christmas past, Baby Jesus did not weep blood in the nativity scenes of every church in Norway or Uruguay. Nor, indeed,have governments marched into churches and forced clerics to marry homosexual couples, much less forced heterosexuals of the same sex to marry one another.

None of that has happened. All that is just the crazy worst case scenario so ridiculous that it ought to make all of us laugh… though unfortunately, a few seem incapable of laughing because they’re so histrionically possessed by fear that they can’t see past it to the rational conclusion that it’s not well-founded.

For all the distressing “climaxing” that opponents of same-sex marriage seem to imagine and obsess about, the Gay-Marriage-Pocalypse is actually anti-climactic. A movie set in that time–in the time when gay marriage is legalized everywhere in a society–would be mostly indistinguishable from a movie set in our time except that it’d probably shuffle the genders of one or two couples among the characters. Even so, the difference might not even be noticeable unless it focused on a same-sex couple’s wedding, or involved a scene in a party where a bigot is introduced to his male coworkers husband, or his female boss’s wife. Because they day after gay marriage is legalized, almost nothing about the world actually changes for straight people. It’s that simple.

Whether we can get bigots to recognize it and chill out on the panic, that’s another question. I’m dubious, at least in part because panic is sort of inherently hardwiredin the minds of people attracted to conservative positions. But it certainly seems like an avenue into understanding their panic. What images lurk in the inchoate fear. It would be interesting to see a scientific study of what opponents of gay marriage experience,neurologically, when asked to imagine the day gay marriage is legalized worldwide… as well as to do a qualitative analysis of what imagery they report when doing so.

And suddenly an idea for a short, satirical film script pops into my mind. Hm…

6 Comments

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It is a bit more complicated than that...January 14, 2014 at 8:47 am . PermalinkReply

While there are indeed people who, as you put it, fear a “Gay-Marriage-Pocalypse,” I think you are looking at the worst examples to the exclusion of the much less panicked and more cerebral arguments out there regarding gay marriage. Your argument seems to implicitly assume that only stupid/bigoted/hateful people could possibly object to gay marriage, or rather, if you look at it another way, prioritize opposite-sex marriage. This certainly seems to be an increasingly popular position, where once people could simply disagree in good faith, a sadly elusive thing today.

But, in fact, a perfectly rationale argument can be made in favour of what might be described as the “traditional family,” and it takes a lack imagination or good faith in other people’s intentions to fail to see it.

That argument relates to children and the desirability of having a mother and a father. Many if not most people agree that mothers and fathers have important complimentary roles. Until very recently, the radical position would have been to say otherwise. To say that gender is irrelevant in this consideration is to implicitly say that there is no particular value in having a father or mother. It is not clear to me why this should be any less offensive than prioritizing opposite-sex parents in adoption. Such an outlook is also strangely at odds with liberal arguments for greater female presence in the business world and other spheres.

Of course, not all will agree that there is particularly any value in complimentary mother-father roles, but is it really pathological or reflective of panic or blind hate to be among those who do? Many people are perfectly aware that gay people are just that, people — some good, some bad, and most in between — while also thinking that — in general, on average, with all the exceptions that our complicated lives make unavoidable — having a mother and father (or closest substitute in the case of adoption) is a good ideal.

You seem to prioritize logic and rationality in your outlook, which is admirable. If you tried to see this from another point of view, you might appreciate that the debate can actually be more nuanced than you appear to think.

It isn’t simply about fearful, hard-wired-to-hate, knuckleheads versus the enlightened. Much in the same way as ticking the box for a centre-left political party doesn’t mean you are wishing for the next incarnation of Chairman Mao.

Well, this is a lot more lucid than the previous responses I’ve seen on Facebook (particularly the word salad posted by the last person to flip his lid on me) so, I’ll address it.

Frankly, your argument reads like well-intentioned but intellectually dishonest hogwash. If people were really, truly concerned so deep down, so powerfully, about the need for male and female adult role models for children, and motivated by that instead of by bigotry–then they wouldn’t be arguing against same-sex marriage in public demonstrations and on internet forums.

They would do the following, instead:

1. Create vast volunteer organizations to provide the service of offering adult role models to any family that is in need. After all, spending uncountable hours ranting online or demonstrating in front of legislatures doesn’t help the kids… not just in same-sex households, but also in families where divorce or death has left a single-parent alone in raising kids.

Of course, same-sex parents and single parents may have plenty of resources to provide their kids with role models of both sexes. It’s not like homosexuals teleport in from space, after all: there are parents, siblings, friends, teachers, neighbours, and communities they can rely upon for help–just as any family does–or, at least, in theory this is true. It’s harder in a bigoted environment, of course, and bigotry does sometimes render family and community relationships impossible to rely upon. Gays in places where they are excluded from churches and many other traditional community networks, may actually have a need for such a service. (See point 2, below.)

So, if these people were truly concerned about the children, they would put their money where their mouths are, and put in the time to ensure that all kids get a chance to spend time with adults of both sexes, regardless of who their parents are.

This is the insight that puts the lie to your justification: worry about the children is a thin justification for bigotry and the opposition of equal rights. After all, note where the vast majority of effort goes… to preventing homosexuals from being able to marry one another, not to ensuring the kids who inevitably live in such families have the resources that (those activists believe) they need.

2. Actively combat anti-gay stereotypes and bigotry, which are very certain to contribute to any negative outcomes experienced by kids in same-sex parent households. After all, kids in same-sex parent households live in a bigoted society–a society so bigoted that people will use those children as a justification to fight the inauguration of a basic civil rights among their homosexual compatriots.

(Whether or not kids get confused about their sexual identity with same-sex parents is what you imply… and, anecdotally, I’ve known several people raised by same-sex couples. Not one of them is homosexual. Certainly no evidence suggests a higher rate of homosexuality among such children. Let’s set aside the (important) question of whether it would be relevant if it did happen, and just note that it doesn’t.)

There are studies that argue there are some negatives to being raised by same-sex couples. There are also many studies that argue that there are none, or that it’s comparably no more advantageous than one of a range of other alternative families. What we can agree is that the studies are inconclusive–and of necessity would have to be–because they don’t take into account the human experience of being a kid in a family like this, in a bigoted society.

But ask yourself: do we do studies about whether it’s better to be raised by black parents, or mixed-race parents? And do we tend to imply that any differences in outcomes must necessarily impugn the parenting abilities of people of different races? Or do we go for a more sophisticated analysis in that case?

In South Korea, where I lived for over a decade, kids in mixed-race families (especially mail-order bride families) tended to have much worse outcomes than all-Korean families. Is it because Vietnamese, Filipina, Chinese and women are terrible parents? Or could it be that an atmosphere in which a stay at home mother on a spousal visa is called things like “migrant worker” and mixed-race children are called “mongrel” has a negative effect on the kid? Do you think it could be that having a parent, or parents, regarded by many as second-class citizens, might have a negative effect? Could it possibly be that living with the unremitting hatred of bigots being lobbed at one constantly–and being told by people that one’s parents are somehow bad, or wrong, or dirty, or perverts, might have a negative effect?

(And, yes, I’ve been told by Koreans that it’s irresponsible to marry a Korean woman, because our kids will experience discrimination. My response is, “Why justify and enfranchise the discrimination? If you actually care that much… fight against discrimination and racism!” But, of course, the people who express such concern never, ever do. Because the plight of mixed-race kids is something they don’t give a shit about. They just disapprove of interracial marriage because they’re racists, and want a nice excuse to justify their opposition.)

Frankly, it’s obvious that social hostility of the kids I mentioned above exist, and affect kids in same-sex households. That is a demonstrable fact. If the people who “worry” about children in these families really “worried” about them, they’d be fighting bigotry, and fighting to ensure respect was extended to such families–to all families who experience bigotry in society–in order to reduce the load that such children endure, and that such parents endure in ways that likely affect their families. That would be a far more effective way of helping the children in these families.

The take home is that if people’s concern was truly first and foremost the children, they would be behaving vastly differently. (Not just in the case of same-sex parent families, but also single families.)

The truth is, people who oppose same-sex marriage really don’t care enough to try help these kids at all: that’s a thin smokescreen sham of fake concern and empathy. Their energies are clearly and overtly devoted to their true concern, which is preventing the enfranchisement of homosexuals with equal marriage rights, just as, a generation ago, those same energies were devoted–and by the same kinds of people–to the prevention of the enfranchisement of nonwhites with equal educational, housing… and marriage rights, when it comes to white partners.

And the simple truth is, bigots often resort to the ploy of fake concern in order to justify their bigotry. It’s a strategy as old as the bloody hills, and not one that anyone really concerned with the fate of anyone’s children would take up and use.

More conservatives probably should to do more to promote role models and combat anti-gay bigotry. You are right that plenty of anti-gay marriage advocates are fearful of, or hateful toward, gay people. But, once again, I don’t see why that necessarily should be the case. You are observing people perhaps in your personal life or the media, but that is not to say all people who think differently from you are like that.

“The truth is, people who oppose same-sex marriage really don’t care enough to try help these kids at all:”

This is a generalization. I know otherwise that not everyone who has regard for the traditional family unit is some fire-breathing bigot. Can you really not imagine the picture being more complex? You seem surprised that I sound “lucid.” Perhaps this can be a lesson that not everyone within a certain ideological sphere is the same — caricature conservatives and liberals et al don’t represent that nuances of positions on important arguments.

You call my argument “hogwash,” but you do more to question other people’s motives than to argue that there is something obscene about thinking children deserve a mother and father where possible.

For the record, I never implied, or certainly never intended to imply, that children of gay parents are likely to turn out gay, or that was a concern of mine, as you say.

Regarding marriage between different races, the argument, while again increasingly popular, is actually weak. I would argue, with science on my side, that the differences between the races are negligible in comparison to those between gender. Skin colour is fundamentally arbitrary, especially before society starts to impart certain ideas onto it. Moreover, procreation is not by definition based on unions between whites and whites, and blacks and blacks etc. Biology, however, has dictated that the ONLY way to reproduce is through a man and woman. This is something very fundamental in our nature.

I don’t have any “fake concern,” nor do I fear or dislike any group en mass. I am simply a normal person who believes, like countless others, that there is a sound argument in favor of a biological mother and father raising their children, or the closest possible substitute.

You kind of miss my point. When I highlighted a (near-complete) lack of effort on the part of conservatives to combat anti-gay bigotry and a very apparent lack of interest in actually doing the work to provide kids with role models on both sexes, it wasn’t to highlight what conservatives should do more of: it was to highlight that conservatives care more about “the children” in their role a tool for opposing gay marriage, than actually caring about other people’s children.

And my point is that opponents of gay marriage are inherently hateful. You cannot be against a group of people having equal civil rights in your society without, on some level, hating and dehumanizing those people. That’s the iron-solid core that underlies every argument. Sure, some “nice” conservatives have convinced themselves that their disapproval is rooted in other things: but every argument I’ve run across is hogwash.

The traditionalists who claim it’s redefining marriage in unacceptable ways are spouting hogwash. (Marriage has constantly been redefine over the millennia, in most societies. The evidence shows that one more inclusive change will not end the world.)

The conservatives who say that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” are spouting hogwash. If everything is God’s creation, then humans–like most mammals–are likely much more fluid in their sexuality than cultures program us to be. Homosexual acts have been observed in countless species: does God hate sodomitical ducks too? Or could God maybe have created homosexually-oriented ducks as an indicator that a little homosexuality is everywhere in nature, and Christians should chill out about it, or, gasp, work to overcome their enculturated prejudices?

(Not that I think there’s a God, but, you know, for the purposes of argument.)

“The truth is, people who oppose same-sex marriage really don’t care enough to try help these kids at all:”

This is a generalization. I know otherwise that not everyone who has regard for the traditional family unit is some fire-breathing bigot.

I didn’t say they were fire-breathing bigots. I said that they were intellectually dishonest, and that they were claiming to care about other people’s children more than they actually do… that they were using children as a justification for the denial of civil rights to one select group of their compatriots on the basis of difference.

(Otherwise, why haven’t conservatives long-ago made it illegal for parents in families with children to take jobs that require extensive travel on the part of one parent?)

Can you really not imagine the picture being more complex? You seem surprised that I sound “lucid.” Perhaps this can be a lesson that not everyone within a certain ideological sphere is the same — caricature conservatives and liberals et al don’t represent that nuances of positions on important arguments.

I’m sorry, but you’re taking the arguments at face value; I’m assessing them and seeing psychological motives of justification at work, deeper beneath the surface. Who’s lacking in imagination, here? Are you telling me that when people say, “I’m doing X because Y…” you really, truly believe they’re always doing it because of Y? That, to me, sounds like a lack of both imagination and understanding of human nature. Human beings are hypocritical. That’s not as judgmental as you might think: it’s a simply fact of human beings, and one that most religions and philosophies take into account when talking about human beings.

I realize that not everyone within a certain ideological sphere is the same. There are neurological, psychological, and ideological tendencies, though. There’s culture. There’s talking points: and most people within any one ideological sphere (left and right alike) really do just parrot the talking points. Hell: anyone who really, truly buys into the idea of belonging to a left or a right is doing that, on some level. For me, the left is only a provisional position–one with problems of its own–but it tends against privileging those already holding the reins of power, and against privileging bigotry institutionally. So I adopt the left as a provisional tool.

You call my argument “hogwash,” but you do more to question other people’s motives than to argue that there is something obscene about thinking children deserve a mother and father where possible.

Because the onus is not on me to “prove” that your claim is hogwash. If it isn’t, you should be able to demonstrate it, categorically and without weasel words.

See, this is the thing: your argument is nothing more than verbalized anxiety. It doesn’t deserve to be regarded highly because it’s not a highly informed opinion. That much is apparent from your clear lack of understanding that, to make an argument, you can’t just accuse others of ad hominem, but you need to offer evidence. (And not pick-and-choose it from studies congenial to your point: you need to be familiar with all the evidence, and need to draw sensible conclusions that reflect all the evidence.)

Until you present me with some sweeping account of the negative effects of being raised by same-sex parents, one that actually reflects the state of the art in research today, your so-called opinion is really nothing more than verbalized anxiety… and you know, the question actually is at least partially answered: lots of kids in same-sex parented households do just as well as kids in traditional families, according to studies. At worst, they tend to do as poorly as kids in single-parent households. And while you’d be quick to point at the missing parent, or missing gender among their adult role model, I would point to outside factors: growing up poor, or in a family targeted by bigotry, is likely to make it harder to focus on academics, to escape childhood without some kind of traumatizing violence from other kids or teachers, and so on.

For the record, I never implied, or certainly never intended to imply, that children of gay parents are likely to turn out gay, or that was a concern of mine, as you say.

Well, you certainly seemed to be implying it. So, what negative outcomes are you worried about for children, that absolutely couldn’t be equally explained by a social atmosphere of bigotry, or social isolation, or possibly economic factors?

Regarding marriage between different races, the argument, while again increasingly popular, is actually weak. I would argue, with science on my side, that the differences between the races are negligible in comparison to those between gender. Skin colour is fundamentally arbitrary, especially before society starts to impart certain ideas onto it. Moreover, procreation is not by definition based on unions between whites and whites, and blacks and blacks etc. Biology, however, has dictated that the ONLY way to reproduce is through a man and woman. This is something very fundamental in our nature.

Yes, and I understand that within your ideological sphere, it’s common to pretend that human sexuality is fundamentally created for the purposes of procreation. But you need to understand that outside of your ideological (and, I’m guessing theological) sphere, that’s not a given. It’s wrong, and oppressive, for you to impose that. What you’re saying is that people need to be able to have babies in order to have a marriage.

Which to me sounds like saying people who are infertile, women who have experienced menopause, men who have experienced debilitating injuries, people who through no fault of their own were born hermaphrodite and are also infertile, and people who do not desire to have children, ought to also be banned from marriage. After all, they are all equally as infertile as a homosexual couple.

The fundamental problem here is that you’re privileging reproductive sex as the defining factor in marriage… but out there in the world, marriages aren’t always reproductive.

I don’t have any “fake concern,” nor do I fear or dislike any group en mass. I am simply a normal person who believes, like countless others, that there is a sound argument in favor of a biological mother and father raising their children, or the closest possible substitute.

And like most “normal” people, you don’t perceive your own cognitive bias, namely, that the sex of the parents is crucial. It isn’t.

Now, I have a special reason for being offended by your argument, and I’m going to tell you what it is. My wife and I tutor Korean children. A lot of Korean children. That’s how we make our living. Korean parenting norms range from slightly oppressive, to outright insanely abusive. Of course, we’re teaching kids in expatriate families in the third world, so it’s not like we can call child protective services. We’ve found that a part of the teaching we do necessarily involves helping kids learn strategies to deal with abusive parents, and to survive the insanity of a Korean childhood with their creativity, critical thinking, and personalities intact. I’m talking about kids who don’t realize that telling a stranger, “My mother beat me because the poem I wrote in English had the wrong rhythm,” or, “My mother beat the family dog to death one day because its shit stank,” or, “I hate my father because he never talks to me except saying, ‘Go study,'” is weird. They think that stuff is, socially, normal.

So, too, do they think their obvious depression is normal. (Since you likely don’t know, suicide is the number one killer of Korean children, as well as everyone in Korea under the age of 40.) When parents are beating children over a 1% difference in a grade, or insisting their children study 18 hours a day (and telling them that at age 12, it’s ridiculous to want to play outside); when children are showing up with obvious learning disabilities, and parents chalk it up to laziness; when parents are constantly describing their children as fat, stupid, ugly, useless… physical abuse of children in Korean families is extremely common, psychological abuse even more so. And as a teacher, I can attest that this all is very, very powerful in how it shapes the children. Negative, passive, defeatist, pessimistic, self-loathing attitudes are common in the worst families… the families where, right away, you can tell that one or another parent is covering up for abuse.

So believe me when I say to you: there are homosexuals I know who could do a better job raising a child alone than a fair number of the heterosexual couples who raise the children I teach. Why pick on the same-sex parented families, and let all kinds of other abuses be socially acceptable? Because, while these norms are extreme in contrast to US society, there’s profound abuse of children in every area, just beneath the surface.

Which is the real thing: conservatives who hold up the fate of the children raised by same-sex couples are hypocrites because they pretend to worry about the children, but then go straight on ahead and refuse to (a) give a damn about all the abused kids in traditional families, or (b) give homosexuals the same modicum of respect they give straight people, including a lot of straight people who really don’t deserve that respect.

In other words: why preemptively prevent the worst potential negative outcomes of same-sex parents? Why not allow them to try, and demonsrate their parental fitness, and deal with the kids who are suffering on a case by case basis, as we do with heterosexual couples?

That, Jimmy, is what bigotry looks like. It’s not about your essential nature, it’s about your choice to focus on one trait of difference, and see it as justification to slam a door on some people, while holding the door wide open for a bunch of people who you perceive as being the same as you, who actually probaby have less business going through that door than the people you’re keeping out.

There’s a secondary argument, which is: what makes you think that most gay couples want to have kids? And what makes you think that the kids they would acquire by adoption, foster care, and so on, would necessarily be worse off than they were in the circumstances they’d otherwise be in? All of that is quite reminiscent of the Korean grudge against overseas adoptions today: most Koreans are rampantly against overseas adoption, and hate the idea of Korean kids being raised in white (or other) families abroad. At the same time, Korea has scandalously low rates of adoption of Korean orphans, and scandalously poor conditions for orphans who aren’t adopted. Worying about the fate of the kids is a smokescreen: if people worried about the kids, they’d fight to make adoption more socially acceptable, and to get those kids either into loving homes, or at least to improve their living and educational conditions to the point where they’re not third class citizens. It’s not the kids they’re worried about: it’s just the bad reputation Korea get from exporting its unwanted, neglected children instead of taking care of them domestically.

But that doesn’t stop the people who obsess about this constantly claiming that the kids are their primary concern.

Another wonderful example from Korea: all foreign instructors brought to Korea from abroad to work with children must have an HIV test, because they pose a threat to the children with whom they work, and drug tests. And, yes, Koreans know how HIV is transmitted: a hate group popularized the idea that foreign teachers are potential perverts and druggies, and even though criminal record checks have been instituted, foreign teachers must undergo these tests anyway. The hate groups and government claim that they’re doing it for the sake of the children.

Well, and frankly, criminal record checks for immigrant workers isn’t a bad idea. (HIV and drug tests arguably violate the Korean constitution, though nobody cares since it’s not Korean nationals, even though the constitution’s outlined rights cover everyone in the country. Note, though, that because of the “think of the children” justifiation, English teachers had to undergo HIV tests, but not women brought in on “entertainer” visas–which, it’s an open secret, are brought in to work the sex trade.) Still: background checks and the rest, I don’t have a huge problem with… except that it’s unevenly applied. These people claim to care about the children… but why, then, are Korean instructors not subject to the same exact standards of vetting? Korean teachers don’t take drug tests, HIV tests, or submit criminal record checks to get jobs in the same institutions…

… and, prepare to have your mind blown, there are about five or six reported/known cases in which a foreign teacher has sexually molested a Korean student. In all of Korean history, five or six reported cases. Each one is horrible, but frankly, just anecdotally I’ve heard of twice as many cases just within my own social networks, where a Korean was involved sexually with an underage student; but are Korean instructors subject to HIV & drug tests, or criminal record checks? Of course not.

You may see this as different. I see them absolutely the same: human beings being considered more problem-causing or untrustworthy because of one trait, and being preemptively denied equal civil rights, and bigots–many of whom do not even realize they are bigots, and really do believe they’re acting in the best interests of the children–using children as a justification for the maltreatment of the minority group, even while ignoring the dangers children more often face from the majority group.

It’s obviously hypocritical and ridiculous when someone is doing it to someone who looks like you. It’s just as hypocritical and ridiculous when someone does it to someone different from you, whether or not your cognitive bias allows you to register that immediately, Jimmy.

Oh, and your lucidity? The bar was pretty low: the previous commenters on Facebook served up, I’m not exaggerating, raging word salad. Your argument is still inane and commonplace, it’s just not full of broken sentences and jumbled references to extraneous things (like 9-11 or the Federal Reserve). Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard, in other words.